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How QuizUp took the games throne

QuizUp, Thor Fridriksson's social general-knowledge app, has taken the games throne

Rafael Pinho

This article was taken from the May 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

Thor Fridriksson, founder of Icelandic games developer Plain Vanilla Corp, is tired. He hasn't had much downtime since QuizUp launched last November. "It's funny - when I had this dream of seeing our app at number one, I imagined my quality of life would improve," he says. "Quite the contrary." Eight days after release, the game had reached a million users, and was adding 100,000 more each day. Then, in December, Plain Vanilla closed a $22 million (£13 million) series-B funding round. It's a different kind of exhaustion from when their first app, 2011's child-friendly game The Moogies, failed to sell. On the verge of shuttering the company, Plain Vanilla's remaining four employees raised $1 million, sat down and imagined the game that became QuizUp. The rest is exponential history.

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QuizUp players can suggest a topic - there were 365 as WIRED went to press - and any player can apply to add questions to the game's database. So far 40,000 players have asked to become quizmasters. Niche subjects have a particularly powerful attraction. Fridriksson, 34, loves Game of Thrones, he explains, and so do his friends. So they compete for bragging rights. As they play, they get drawn into the social elements - talking about the episodes through one-to-one chat and message boards. And, if they want, they can become question setters, and debate whether the Lord of the Eyrie is called Robert or Robin.

For now, though, Plain Vanilla has its eye on another title: "We want to establish QuizUp as the brand for knowledge and trivia. I think that throne has been held by Trivial Pursuit for too long." QuizUp is available for iOS.

This article was first published in the May 2014 issue of WIRED magazine